... the heaploads of cell phone manufacturers who use Google's code and who may or may not have the ability to distribute the fix...

Faulty premise: The issue isn't that they do not have the ability to distribute fixes; it's that they each have different levels of corporate red tape, preventing the expeditious distribution of these fixes. That's been an ongoing problem in the Android market for years, now. Thus, the benefit of this reveal is that, when an exploit hits the wild (and it would have with or without this announcement) these researchers (and Google) can all respond to outraged customers by saying, "Don't blame me! I did my part!" and point their fingers out to the carriers.

I'm pretty sure I had one of these offending apps, at one time -- though, in my case it may have been a legitimate error on the part of the developer, rather then malicious: It was an alarm clock app for iOS, which displayed a banner ad when you had it in portrait mode but not when you had it in landscape mode. Funny thing is, I learned in the course of time that it was still downloading those ads regardless of orientation, because there's an odd quirk in the way some (or all?) iOS apps download ads; they retain the ad on the device for some indeterminate period of time. Since I just left the iPad charging and sitting on that alarm clock app whenever I wasn't actively using the iPad, this caused that one app to bloat to ridiculous proportions over time, eventually filling up multiple gigabytes of space -- that is to say, all of the remaining space on the iPad.

(Naturally, I eventually ditched that app and sought out one which was entirely ad-free.)

With the size of some recent phones, I think assuming use of a backpack might be just as realistic.

With the ever increasing ubiquity of internet addiction, I think assuming that some phones almost never leave the owners hand might also be realistic. (And yeah... I'll confess that I'm speaking for myself, to some degree.)

Layzej writes: The popular narrative in the media these days is that the GOP is in denial about the science of climate change. Mark Reynolds of the Citizens’ Climate Lobby says that this perception is largely manufactured by the media that thrives on conflict. After meeting with over 500 House and Senate offices in Washington, his organization found that republicans largely accept the science, but balk at solutions that involve more government, more red tape and more regulations.

Many republicans would like to have a seat at the policy table. They would bring a market-friendly approach that doesn’t dictate which technologies win or how we should conduct our lives. Reynolds suggests that a Carbon Fee and Dividend is one such solution. "By returning all revenue from the carbon fee to households, we accomplish two things: Keep the federal government from getting bigger and add jobs by putting money into the pockets of people who will spend it."Link to Original Source

Okay... but then again, why waste so many years in college in the first place, for that matter? If you're actually talented at coding, then you can probably learn more on-the-job then you ever will in a classroom.

snydeq writes: InfoWorld's Paul Solt argues that It’s high time to make the switch to the more approachable, full-featured Swift for iOS and OS X app dev. 'Programming languages don’t die easily, but development shops that cling to fading paradigms do. If you're developing apps for mobile devices and you haven't investigated Swift, take note: Swift will not only supplant Objective-C when it comes to developing apps for the Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and devices to come, but it will also replace C for embedded programming on Apple platforms. Thanks to several key features, Swift has the potential to become the de-facto programming language for creating immersive, responsive, consumer-facing applications for years to come.'

I know this is practically blasphemy on the internet... but I actually read the original article. I so doing, I found something particularly confusing about it: While it leads off with that "Internet Customers Surpass Cable Subscribers at Comcast" headline, it then proceeds to say the following further in...

"... At the end of the first quarter, Comcast counted 22.375 million video customers and 22.369 million high-speed Internet customers...."

I mean, sure... It's been quite a few years since I took a math class -- but I'm pretty sure that 22.375 > 22.369, if only by a very small margin. Was the author too impatient to wait for his headline to actually come true, (likely next quarter) and playing loose with their numbers, or is that simply a typo?

Nerval's Lobster writes: A new Wall Street Journal article details how IBM CIO Jeff Smith is trying to make Big Blue, which is going through some turbulent times as it attempts to transition from a hardware-dependent business to one that more fully embraces the cloud and services, operate more like a startup instead of a century-old colossus. His solution centers on having developers work in smaller teams, each of which embraces Agile methodology, as opposed to working in huge divisions on multi-year projects. In order to unite employees who might be geographically dispersed, IBM also has its groups leave open a Skype channel throughout the workday. Smith hopes, of course, that his plan will accelerate IBM’s internal development, and make it more competitive against not only its tech-giant competition, but also the host of startups working in common fields such as artificial intelligence.Link to Original Source

Others seem intent on commenting on the questions of slander/libel/censorship... but I think a far more important question to pose is that of jurisdiction. I think that Google should simply permit Japan to have their way -- within Japan's sovereign territory -- but Google should not allow this ruling to have any impact whatsoever on what they display to users outside of that jurisdiction.

This reminds me of when the US was attempting to obtain e-mails from Microsoft, when those e-mails were hosted on a Dublin server; I didn't agree with the United States' argument for jurisdiction then, and I don't agree with Japan's argument for jurisdiction now.

Seriously? Of course I'm making that all up, dude; it's called satirical commentary, and it's meant to be empirically obvious. You didn't really think that the CEO of a Dutch drug company had used American slang, and paraphrased Star Wars in his statements to the media, did you?

The whole point is that this guy is waving his hands about and making all kinds of accusations against companies in other countries which are undeniably his competitors, and then pointing to all of the region-specific problems being caused by those competitors... and even if he never once claimed that his own company might also be at fault for similar issues, he certainly didn't come right out and say, "Yeah... we need to get our own shit together, too." So he's basically claiming innocence by omission.